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I am Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I am also the editor of the academic journal The Latin Americanist.

Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles immediately went on television and said his campaign accepted the decision of the election council, thereby defusing for now a standoff with Maduro, who is to be inaugurated as president Friday.

My initial take is that this will take the air out of the opposition. After all the hot air and inflammatory rhetoric, the government is actually doing what the opposition wants. Well, not exactly after the rhetoric, because Nicolás Maduro is still trying to fulfill his personal pledge to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by saying the word "fascist" more in one day than anyone else in history.

In the meantime, of course, Maduro will be sworn in, so by the time the count is completed he will have been president for a month and people will be getting more used to that fact. At least as it stands now, this is a very uphill road for Capriles.

1 comments:

In other words, the CNE is calling Capriles' bluff. All of this goes to show that it really makes no sense for you, Greg, to so constantly single out the Chavistas for Venezuela's polarization, as it is obvious that Capriles has no real basis for having called Maduro "illegitimate" from the moment the results were announced. Maduro's rhetoric is, as I've noted, fundamentally problematic as well, but your undying tendency is to see only what the Chavistas do wrong and to ignore that there is a longstanding dynamic between Chavismo and the opposition, in which both engage in overblown rhetoric on a regular basis.